Running, if you are addicted to endorphins, is only possible here at night, when the sun does not broil your brain and char your skin.
It also gives you a glimpse, on Jalalabad airfield, a base secure enough that you’re not meant to keep your body armour around you, of the real space soldiers fighting this war occupy.
The partial and forced relaxation of a smouldering evening in Nangahar.
A picnic table, beneath a canopy. Cigars smoked on a bench. Men of Slavic accent chatting next to a large pile of water bottles. The low humming of a call to prayer. The higher pitched hum of a very small aircraft – probably a Predator drone – on the runway nearby.
The air is still, almost serene, and the moon two-thirds full. A group of American contractors sit around a table. If they are not drinking, as the rules forbid, their faces demand the pleasure of alcohol, and the idea of drink seems to consume their thoughts, drip from their ponytails. A jeep drives slowly past you, slows down, as if to mimic or mock your speed, and then heads off.
Airbases are deceptively small places, made bigger by the heat and dust they command. I reach the end of one road, and turn around. You don’t want to just head off down a dirt road in this sort of place.
More contractors, sitting this time in the pitch black, gathered near a chemical toilet. I wish for their sake they have some compelling reason to be there that’s not immediately visible. I run ahead, down a road along the airfield, towards what seems to be the first of several front gates.
The smell of petrol sharpens the air. Some Afghan men sit on the floor between their camp beds outside on a building’s terrace. The still, again, of the evening air.
Then gunfire. At first, it seems a mistake. Like practice. But then it continues. Return fire. Sustained shots coming from what seems to be a collection of headlights ahead of me. It looks like something’s up at the front gate.
It’s the wrong sort of adrenalin now in my veins, and I stand behind a concrete wall, even though it seems too far away. It goes on. And on. I run away. As I head back into the heart of the base, a young soldier, his iPod only in one ear as he runs, passes me. I frantically wave my arms. Don’t go down there, there’s shooting, I say. He replies: what, is the road closed? And then he runs on.
I shower. The man next to me has a tattoo on his lower leg. “Fuck peace”.
You don’t really talk in the shower; it’s a man rule it seems in these places. But I have to ask where he got it done.
‘Back on base.’
I continue: Is that your motto?
‘Well, it’s sort of a bit of mine a bit of my unit’s. It’s how we roll.’
Un-huh.
The water is cold.
Nick Paton Walsh is embedded with the US military on the eastern Afghanistan / Pakistan border on the airbase F.O.B. Bostick.